The Adventures of Marco Polo (The Samuel Goldwyn Company, United Artists, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (June 4) Turner Classic Movies kicked off a “Star of the Month” tribute to Gary Cooper with some of his greatest films – Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Pride of the Yankees, Sergeant York – along with one of the biggest flops of his career, a 1938 Samuel Goldwyn production called The Adventures of Marco Polo. Cooper played the titular Venetian explorer who was supposedly the first European to visit China, who won an audience with Emperor Kublai Khan (George Barbier) and succeeded in opening China to trade with Europe. (This made it an ironic film to see in the middle of President Trump’s bizarre and inexplicable trade war with China and his insistence that he can resolve the differences between our countries if he can get a personal face-to-face meeting with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.) Samuel Goldwyn was always proud when he could win a major (or not-so-major) talent from the major studios; he’d just pulled Gary Cooper away from Paramount and director Archie L. Mayo from Warner Bros. When the film flopped Goldwyn blamed Mayo and relegated him to such mundane tasks as carrying cans of film from one part of the studio to another. Fellow Goldwyn director William Wyler told Mayo to quit while he still had a shred of dignity left, but Mayo said he couldn’t; he’d just bought a new house on the strength of his Goldwyn contract and needed the money Goldwyn had promised him to make the payments. The script was by Robert L. Sherwood, who in his 1927 play The Road to Rome had created an engaging comedy by taking people from a legendary time (in The Road to Rome it was Hannibal and the Roman government he and his Carthaginians were fighting) and making them talk, behave, and act like people from the 1920’s or 1930’s. He tried the same trick in his script here, but it didn’t work.

It’s hard to say just why The Adventures of Marco Polo doesn’t come off, given the number of genuinely talented people involved. Certainly the sets (designed by Richard Day) look like the plaster-and-plywood concoctions they no doubt were; Cooper is definitely miscast (the part needed someone with more dash, like Fredric March or Errol Flynn, and got Cooper’s laconic reserve instead); and there was a notorious controversy around the leading lady, Sigrid Gurie. Goldwyn was passing her off as “the Norwegian Garbo,” but it turned out that though Gurie’s parents were Norwegian immigrants, she herself was born in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. The plot involves Marco Polo arriving in China, being served a noodle dish which he resolves to bring home to Italy, falling in love with Kublai Khan’s daughter Princess Kukachin (Gurie) and running afoul of the Khan’s sinister grand vizier, Ahmed (Basil Rathbone). Kukachin is in a long-distance engagement to the King of Persia (whom we never see) that was brokered when they were both babies, but Ahmed wants her for himself and so does Marco Polo. There’s also a subplot involving a rebel leader named Kaidu (Alan Hale), who’s upset because without the Khan’s knowledge Ahmed is imposing ruinous taxes on his people and pocketing the money himself. To get rid of Marco Polo and his annoying comic-relief sidekick Binguccio (Ernest Truex in a genuinely witty performance), Ahmed decides to send them to Kaidu’s redoubt, where the paranoid Kaidu will have them executed as spies. Only Marco Polo saves himself when Kaidu orders him to romance Kaidu’s wife Nazama (Binnie Barnes) so he can be left alone to fool around with his maid (Lana Turner in one of her earliest roles). Ultimately Marco Polo talks himself out of his sexual bondage to Mr. and Mrs. Kaidu by encouraging Kaidu to launch an attack on the Khan’s fortress, while the Khan and his army are off trying to conquer Japan. (Remember that when this movie was made Japan was trying to conquer China.)

Ahmed works out a plan to trap Kaidu by sealing the gates to the palace compound and thereby cutting him off from his army, but Marco Polo figures out how to break into the palace by using a stockpile of gunpowder, which Ahmed had ordered for fireworks to celebrate his forced marriage to Kukachin, to blow open the gates and let Kaidu’s army enter. (This is historically accurate: the Chinese invented gunpowder but only used it for fireworks, and it was Westerners who first realized it could be used for weapons.) It ends with Ahmed eaten by his own pet lions after a struggle with Marco Polo (Charles joked about how both Gary Cooper and Basil Rathbone were obviously being stunt-doubled for this sequence), the Khan blessing Marco Polo’s union with Kukachin, and peace and trade contracts between Europe and China established at long last. There are two saving graces to The Adventures of Marco Polo: a quite lovely (and almost continuous) musical score by Hugo Friedhofer and Basil Rathbone’s authority as the villain. There’s even a scene in which we get to see Rathbone topless as he’s being massaged by two men in his entourage, and he’s clean-shaven chest-wise. As I’ve noted before, even on the rare occasions when men were allowed to be topless in 1930’s movies, they were never allowed to show chest hair; either they didn’t have any au naturel or they were obliged to shave it. The Adventures of Marco Polo was a mediocre movie that didn’t do long-term damage to Gary Cooper’s career but was a disaster for Archie Mayo’s; after a career at Warners during which he’d some some quite good movies (Bordertown, The Petrified Forest, Black Legion), he made one more film for Goldwyn (They Shall Have Music, Goldwyn’s vehicle for classical violin star Jascha Heifetz – whose scenes were ghost-directed by William Wyler) and then he ended up at Fox and ran out his career with independent films like The Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca and a vehicle called Angel on My Shoulder with Paul Muni, Anne Baxter, and Claude Rains. Angel on My Shoulder is described on imdb.com as, “The Devil arranges for a deceased gangster to return to Earth as a well-respected judge to make up for his previous life.” Those were made in 1946 and Mayo didn’t direct again even though he lived until 1968.